Piedmont Atlantic Mega Region

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How familiar are you folks with this term? I believe it describes the area up and down I-85 from Birmingham to Raleigh with the Upstate being included, and Atlanta being the center. It is supposedly the fastest growing mega region in the United States out of 10 of them.

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Well it's among a handful of urbanizing regions that are considered to be developing into megalopolises. The others being in FL, CA, TX, CO & a few other places. It is very immature to state that it exists now, as there are very large gaps between Atlanta, Greenville, Charlotte, Greensboro & Raleigh where the population density is under 200 people per square mile. Also, even within the urbanized areas the population density is relatively low for an urbanized area suggesting that this upcoming megalopolis would be better called a sprawlopolis.

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^Yes. It's the term used for an emerging region, not one that currently exists. As teshadoh said, there are huge gaps between the metro areas situated along the I-85 corridor. Contrast that with the Bosh-Wash megalapolis, where just about every tract of land between Boston and Washington along I-95 is developed and the urbanized areas are quite dense.

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All you have to do is review census figures for the past couple of decades - since the 1970's there has been high growth along the I-85 corridor. Both the metropolitan areas & rural areas between those metros have exploded in population growth - among the fastest in the nation. So, that kind of thing is hard to ignore & it doesn't appear to be stopping (though fortunately may be slowing down).